The cartoon has the same premise as the original soap opera, revolving around a group of kids on a 3rd grade class, along with their teacher Helena.
This series provides examples of:
- Absurdly Long Limousine: In "Tudo do Avesso", in the dimension where everyone is the opposite of how they are normally, a rich version of Cirilo arrives to school coming from an extremely long limousine which takes several seconds to pass through the school.
- Adapted Out: The series takes place in a specific period where Mário and Jorge had already joined the school, but René and Margarida hadn't yet, causing the latter two characters to be entirely absent of the show.
- Adaptational Dye-Job: In the live-action show, Suzana is blonde, but in this cartoon she's brunette.
- Alternate Continuity:
- In the original soap opera, Jorge only joined the school after René had already replaced Matilde as the music teacher. In the cartoon, Jorge is studying in the school but Matilde is still the music teacher.
- In the episode "O Pesadelo de Maria Joaquina", Maria Joaquina is shown to have photos of herself in previous yearbooks of the school. The first chapter of the live-action version estabilishes that it's her first year studying there.
- Alternate Reality Episode: In "Tudo do Avesso", Adriano travels to an alternate universe where everyone has opposite and/or swapped personalities: Maria Joaquina is a poor girl with a carpenter dad, and is in love with Cirilo who is rich and hates her; Principal Olívia is kind and calm while Teacher Helena is mean and angry; Daniel is rowdy, Firmino is the clumsy janitor with a Northeast accent instead of Graça, Laura is skinny, etc.
- Animated Adaptation: An animated version of Carrossel.
- Asian Buckteeth: Kokimoto is drawn with large buckteeth, as part of his stereotypical Asian design.
- Boyish Short Hair: Averted with Maria Joaquina in "Uma História Cabeluda". She continues being a Girly Girl like always, but is forced to cut her hair into a pixie cut after it accidentally falls into gum in a garbage can.
- Demoted to Extra: Helena had her role reduced in this animation, serving only as a supporting character to the children giving moral lessons and never being seen as the main focus in any episode.
- Denser and Wackier: While the soap opera itself already had its occasional cartoonish and unrealistic moments, this show takes advantage of its animated format and amps it up, showing situations that could never be replicated in the live-action version, such as a gorilla interacting with the characters, and Imagine Spots of the children playing cowboys.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The show was originally animated with the main characters having placeholder voices done by adults, which were later dubbed over by their actors. In some of the earlier episodes, the temporary voices can occasionally be heard, such as a scene in the pilot where all the kids say "Good morning, teacher Helena" (in later episodes, when they speak collectively, it's with their actors' voices), and a scene where the boys are playing soccer and speaking all at the same time, while the temporary voices can be heard in the background.
- Egg Sitting: In "Bebê Ovo", Helena notices her students complaining about how overprotective their parents are. She decides to assign them to take care of "baby eggs" for one week, so they can feel a bit of the responsability of parenting.
- Freudian Excuse: In the episode where they present the play about Romeo and Juliet, the roles of Romeo and Juliet are chosen for Cirilo and Maria Joaquina respectively, while Jorge is cast in the worst role, being a tree and being practically the only one to win a role of that level. Jorge was clearly seen acting perfectly in the rehearsal before that, while all the other characters who had worse performances got better roles than him. But even so the story tries to favor Cirilo too much to the point to portray him as the victim, although the plot has practically favored his will pairing him with Maria Joaquina as the protagonists (even though she also looked down on Cirilo before) and portray Jorge as an envious villain trying to ruin the play.
- The Ghost:
- Jaime's brother Jonas does not appear in this series, but he's mentioned in the episode "O Casamento da Valéria", when Jaime mentions that his mom has to wash the underwear of his dad, his brother and himself, and his own sometimes doesn't smell very good.
- Several others of the characters' relatives who appear regularly in the live-action version are absent from the cartoon due to not having enough time to focus on all of them. Some examples include Carmen's parents and younger brother, Helena's mother, Mário's baby sister Diana, Valéria's father, Davi's parents, and Adriano's mother.
- Harmless Villain: Teacher Suzana. While in the live-action version she is manipulative, cunning and cruel, in this cartoon she poses no real threat to anyone, and her evil acts are just trying to get Helena away from the school through tame means such as hypnotizing Principal Olívia.
- "Lesson of the Day" Speech: The end of almost every episode has Helena giving a long speech teaching a moral lesson to the children, usually scolding them for an inappropriate action they did earlier in the episode.
- Long-Lost Uncle Aesop: Downplayed with Helena, as she's still an important character, but her main role in this series is mostly just lecturing the kids about what's right and wrong.
- Mythology Gag: In the episode "Tá Namorando", Graça sings a verse of "Aquecimento
", which was her main theme song in the live-action version. - Out of Focus: Jorge is not seen or mentioned at all in the episode "Bebê Ovo", which takes place over the course of one week... Until the very last second of the episode, where he appears for a split second during the group hug to Teacher Helena, despite never appearing in the class during any other scene, and never participating on the Egg Sitting challenge throughout the episode.
- Picture Day: "O Pesadelo de Maria Joaquina" is about picture day at school. The other girls prank Maria Joaquina by giving her a fake tooth gap in the picture.
- Product Placement: One of the episodes ends with Jaime's father asking his son to fill in numbers on his Tele Sena, which is a capitalization bond belonging to the Silvio Santos Group frequently marketed by SBT.
- Snap Back: In the end of "Uma História Cabeluda", Maria Joaquina is forced to cut her hair very short after accidentally falling into a garbage can with gum, while Cirilo also gets a new haircut. By the next episode, both of them have their hair changed back to how they were like before.
- Toilet Humour: This is often provided by Jaime. This also happened in the soap opera, but in this series it seems that the gross-out moments with Jaime have been increased.